Taunton company receives state freight rail grant

TAUNTON — A Taunton company specializing in storing frozen food has received a $475,000 state grant to help enhance its freight train unloading operations.

North East Refrigerated Terminals, with a warehouse on Ingell Street, received the $474,618 grant to enclose its railroad terminal and to create a train-to-truck cross-docking apparatus, allowing for direct transfers of frozen food product from the train and onto the roads to their customers.

“I’m very happy that we received the grant that will let us expand our operations in Taunton,” said Robert Weeks, owner of North East Refrigerated Terminals, which also has facilities in Middleboro. “Basically it’s going to enhance our inbound rail car shipments. We’ll be able to do cross-docking to trailers.”

Weeks said that cross-docking was not previously an option for the company, which instead has always used its 10,000-pound fork trucks to carry the frozen food products on pallets and store them in the warehouse for a few months, before moving it to a loading dock on the other side of the building. Using the grant to build a new siding enclosure at the railroad site will allow the company to more easily move goods in any weather, he said.

“The siding we have now is 60 years old,” Weeks said about the freight railroad infrastructure at the site. “We will enclose our siding to be able to unload cars in all weather, whether rain or snow. Right now we have difficulty. We have trouble unloading rail cars in that weather.”

Weeks said the new infrastructure improvements will bring the rail site up to current standards.

“There are some railroad ties that are twisted and the wood rots,” Weeks said.

The grant for North East Refrigerated Terminals was among seven grants announced on Monday, totaling $2.5 million in industrial rail projects, as part of the 2014 Industrial Rail Access Program, which was created as part of the state’s 2012 Transportation Bond Bill. The IRAP program provides grants to railroads, rail shippers and municipalities, aiming to provide public benefits through improved use of the rail transportation and to enhance economic growth through rail access.

“Improving access to freight rail creates opportunities for companies to do business more efficiently and expand economic opportunity,” said Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, in a statement about the grants. “This targeted grant program represents a solid investment and smart public-private partnership.”

MassDOT Rail and Transit Director and MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott said that these grants “also boost a freight rail industry that has a positive impact on our environment.”

North East Refrigerated Terminals, which now has 10 workers at its Taunton facility, will hire two or three more workers thanks to the grant, Weeks said. The company has been in Taunton since the early ’90s, he said.

Weeks said the train-to-truck cross-docking apparatus that his company will build will feature two trailer doors for trailer trucks to back up into right beside the trains.

“That’ll open a whole new avenue for us,” he said. “It wasn’t efficient to have cross-dock service before this. Now, this adds a new aspect of business.”